Okay, so you know you have created a beautiful, functional and user friendly website fit for your clients needs, but is it enough? If you want your client to realise his online potential to the fullest then you must realise that you also must learn to integrate SEO into your designs. Here are some ways you can do that:
Keywords For SEO
Keywords are essential for any website who wants to be optimised for search engines. Wrong keyword choices may mean that you are not realising the full potential of your website or worse yet, you are not even getting anything out of your online presence. In designing, you need to realise the business objectives. Whether you want to target a local area or want to go global, you need to build pages to target these specifics or build the foundation on where this stuff will go.
Placing your keywords
Realise as well that it is also important for you to know where you should place your keywords. This actually helps search engines find your website.
You should place your target keywords on various places around your website including the Title tag, meta descriptions as well as keywords. You should also place specific keywords on your slogans, navigation and bread crumb trails. If you run a blog, then you should have h1, h2, h3 tags that contain your keywords. Bullet points, alt text, title attributes, internal, external and footer links are also places where you should put your keywords in. As well as your URL and your file and folder names.
URL’s and Filenames
Okay this only means that you have to make your URL friendly to search engines, it’s no good to have generic URL as this tends to get ignored by search and engines and doesn’t help in your site being visible to search engines.
A generic URL may look like this: http://www.mydomains.com/catalogue/item1?=23458 and this is really not a friendly URL and search engines doesn’t get what the site is all about.
You may want to have a more specific search engine friendly URL as such: http://www.mydomains.com/office/supplies/bondpapers
As you may notice, the second URL is very specific and you know what you are getting into, and Google in turn knows it too and will attempt to index you to that particular keyword.
You may also want to name your images into your keywords e.g. a photograph of a patio furniture should be named as such. This can also help you get indexed in the image section of Google.
Images
Speaking of images, you might also want your images optimised for Search engine. Yes, more often than not we disregard images as part of the seo process, but indeed they are.
You can optimised them by ensuring that they are named accordingly as was mentioned before. You might also wish to make your images load faster by keeping them a clear image but maintained small files only.
Make sure you’re image has context on the page and that your alt text is your target keyword.
Social Media Marketing
These days with the advent of social media like twitter and facebook, you should know that this should be part of your seo strategy. This move exposes you more to the community and allows for trust and credibility to be established between you and your consumers.
You can start by joining a few social networks like the ones mentioned above as well as linkedin and digg, a few of the more popular social networking sites.
These are just a few ways in which you can make sure that your website is clearly visible to search engines and to your target market as well. Keep in mind that in the end, you want visitors to your sites that can lead into conversion and sales and ensuring that search engines “see you” is just a part of the process.
Yes, there are ways in which a website can rank into Google overnight but these rankings are just temporary if you don’t have a solid foundation to cling on. So make sure you have a good solid groundwork on your website and you will see everything else fall into their right places. So, take stock of what you really want your online presence to be in your business and make use of tools and techniques that will get you to the results you are hoping for.
